“Indonesia.”
“And then we can use the southerly fence, the one currently keeping in the unlawful emigrants, and we can just open that fence to expel the problem in a southerly direction. Under cover of night. This is just exploiting some permeability that may or may not already be present in our border. Still another option: we can organize detention facilities on or just south of the southerly fence, in a kind of international zone, and we can probably hold the infected there legally, at least for a time, until we discover the treatment options.”
“Isn’t that going to create problems with our cosignatory to the south?”
“We’ve got a transient population in this region, and they come and go from the one signatory to the other, sometimes even including much farther-flung Central American districts; these people migrate like birds, like a vulture that just comes and goes from Chihuahua to the Sonoran Desert without ever worrying about sovereignty.”
“Well, it’s true that the most transient elements, the migrants, the mentally ill homeless, are likely to be struck hardest by the epidemic, or the pandemic, if you accept the computer models, and it makes sense to try to find a way to organize these people so that we can count, monitor, and treat them.”
“If the president can’t even be bothered to attend the meeting, what kind of incentive is there for us to resolve these issues?”
“Does the president even know what’s happening out there?”
“Does someone want to recap the route of transmission of the contagion?”
The anxious and irritable CDC fellow and Gibraltar attempted to respond to this question, though in the rough-and-tumble of the meeting, in which for example one guy, from Housing and Urban Development, got up abruptly from the table and ran for the bathroom with his hand over his mouth, it required sheer doggedness to hold the floor.
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Gibraltar said to the others. “I’m just going from what we have from the ship’s log, but the problem is that the infected patient doesn’t develop genuine symptoms until late in the course of the illness, while he or she is able to communicate the disease from the moment of infection.”
“What about the… what were they calling it, the… disassembly of the body, what exactly does that mean?” someone demanded to know.
The CDC representative found an opening: “It’s like a rapid leprosy in that way. Skin goes bad, and the limbs, the extremities no longer have any of the connective tissue to require them to adhere to the body. The extremities are shed in this way, and then the problem is that not only do they remain contagious—”
Gibraltar: “But for a while they still have movement.”
General incredulity on this point. Gasps, choked laughs.
“How is that possible?”
Gibraltar: “We—”
CDC: “—don’t know.”
“So you’re saying these limbs flop around like the catch on a trawler’s deck—”
“Worse, really, because depending on the extremity in question, they can crawl around some and get into all kinds of trouble, especially if the population into which they are released doesn’t know anything about the course of the disease.”
To which Gibraltar added, “Gentlemen, the situation that we have developing in the area around Rio Blanco is all the result of one arm. One forearm. The forearm belonging to Colonel Jed Richards. A piece of his spacecraft, as I was saying, touched down right outside of Rio Blanco. It’s likely that some undesirables who were the first on the scene attempted to spirit away the arm before we were able to get the security detail from base over to the crash site. That arm, that dead man’s arm, managed to migrate from the crash site into the town of Rio Blanco within six hours, maybe even less. According to what we know through the cooperation of state agencies and others on the ground, the arm managed in that time to pass through a number of crowded areas. While we aren’t sure that everyone who came in contact with the arm was infected, we are sure that some have been — they’re in the hospitals already — and that they are showing signs of progression on a scale that is, well, quite a bit faster than what we experienced on Mars.”
“Probably,” the fellow from the CDC added, “the march through the family of symptoms is stepped up in this much warmer climate.”
“How many people would you estimate are infected?”
“And do you have an idea about how many people are liable to come in contact with each asymptomatic case?”
“Are there pieces of the craft and of… the body of the astronaut… elsewhere? Across the border, for instance?”
“I’d say,” Gibraltar admitted, “that there’s a likelihood—”
At this point Leona, scheduling flunky, interrupted the proceedings, and it took her a long time to do so, a long time to silence the short-tempered, pudgy, middle-aged men, the Caucasian men, the anxious men. Finally, Leona managed to make herself heard, in order to say, “Gentlemen, please rise for the president.”
All eyes on the door, which didn’t close on its hinges entirely, it being of an antique design. If even the sketchiest account of what transpired at the weekend residence were leaked through that cracked door to the instant news resources on the web, it would have meant the end of the administration, its party, perhaps even the NAFTA political establishment as it was known then. And yet the door didn’t close, and various members of the catering staff were coming through routinely to top off a beverage here and there, and to offer another bowl of sorbet.
There’s always an instant when your time is over, Gibraltar would say later, looking back on that momentous entrance. All the bravado that you once displayed, your fearlessness, suddenly vanishes, because of the sheer scale of history. This was it; this was the moment, and Gibraltar experienced it physically, as a sudden gnawing pain in his midsection, as if something were trying to chew its way out. Gibraltar was no stranger to physical discomfort, but there was something new about this particular kind of pain. It was the novelty part that got his attention, as the woodchuck chewing its way out radiated up his esophagus and flared down his flanks. There was nothing to do about it then, because all the men rose, and then the wall-mounted screen at the end of the room flickered on, and the face of the president, mostly shrouded in shadow, appeared on it. He was wearing a shirt and tie, that much was obvious, but there was a way in which he didn’t look like the president for whom they labored, not as he was seen in the press. There was the crackling of the audio portion of the signal beginning, a faint hum that was probably some kind of security apparatus in the room where the filming was taking place, and then the tinny second-generation sound of digital playback.
“Gentlemen, very good of you to come, and I’m really sorry that I’m not able to venture downstairs right now. Please accept my apologies. It’s possible that I might make it down before the end of the meeting. In case you’re wondering, this is a full teleconferencing program we’re running here, so I have been able to participate in the meeting so far. Leona is also taking notes for posterity. We’ll have the typed account as well as the video record. And I trust each of you will be preparing memoranda for your departments. So that we all know what we’re saving here.”